ASC Magazine: Larkin Seiple on “THIS IS AMERICA”

“Once the decision was made to shoot film, the discussion turned to black-and-white versus color. [Cinematographer Larkin Seiple] advocated for color, especially given the medium. “I think film renders color far better than any digital camera out there,” he says. ‘With film cameras, even if you underexpose, you still get a rich skin tone. There’s still information in the shadows to pull from. And with digital, it starts to fall off and become a patina, and the skin looks kind of corpse-like…. Donald’s skin looks great in the video, and there’s all these windows around which create lots of reflections, so we weren’t worried about highlights or overexposing. In fact, we tried to overexpose the image a bit more to make the grain tighter when we [brought] it down.'”